I just got a dedicated server for personal use, hosting a few sites for myself, family and friends. I installed H-sphere as a CP, seeing it's the most cost effective to run in the long term. Currently I'm looking for an easy way to do a complete backup of the system.

I can't seem to find much help with my requirements from the h-sphere docs and forums.

I understand it's best to have backups done periodically and automatically as people often neglect to do it manually, but I'm just sticking to manual backups currently. I need an application that could assist in packing all the files, mail, databases, etc. in the system to a neat package, that I could download directly to my HDD at home, or burn to a CD on the server machine.

Is there anyone using hsphere who has a suggestion, or any other guys who could help? I was previously using CPanel on my VPS, so I never had to worry about backups.

Thanks in advance.

If you only need a control panel for one server, and do hosting for your own/family/friends, then HSphere might be an overkill for you. Not to mention that HSphere CP is really resource hog.

You can consider more light-weight control panel such as DirectAdmin. Or since you already have experience with CPanel/WHM, it might be a good solution as well.

I won't recommend running HSphere on one server.

Have a look at using rsnapshot for making backups. www.rsnapshot.org
You can set it up to back up to a local directory or use it for offsite backups as well. Its pretty easy to setup and works great. Here are a few other links to some Psoft docs that can help,
http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/sysadmin/backup_list.html
http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/sysadmin/backup_hsphere.html

Greetings:

While H-Sphere's beauty shines more when you have more servers, we have a number of managed service customers running H-Sphere in a single server environment. It works for them.

We typically recommend rsnapshot.org for server backup.

http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/sysadmin/backup_list.html lists what is necessary to backup.

Thank you.

Thanks for the replies.

I'm running HSphere for now as it's the most cost effective for me right now, seeing I'm doing this as a hobby, I'm really not getting income, and since I'm just starting up now, there's the monthly colocation costs as well as installment payments for the server to think about. Still think it's worth it though, I've been learning quite a great deal about dedicated servers with it for the past few days. To be frank, I'd much rather stick with webmin, but its support for virtual hosting leaves a much to be desired at the moment, even with the virtualmin addon. CPanel's pricing's alot steeper.

DirectAdmin do look nice, and I may consider using it in the future, though the lifetime fee seems rather steep. (I live in Singapore, it's almost $500 here). Any idea how much I'd would need to pay for additional upgrades after the first 90 days for the lifetime license?

I've actually read about rsnapshot here in webhostingtalk as well as psoft's forum, but I'm not quite sure how to go about setting up those backups? Since my site doesn't change all that often, I would like a easy-to-use solution that also allows me to do full-backups on an ad-hoc basis. Is that possible with rsnapshot, and is there any guide around that could point me in the right direction?

Just to confirm, does rsnapshot also backs up the mail and mysql databases? How do I go about restoring them? With CPanel, they do have .sql dumps in the archive, is it the same with rsnapshots?

Thanks.

Rsnapshot is fairly easy to setup. It will backup whatever directories you tell it to. It also has the ability to run a script (like a mysql dump), so yes it will backup Mysql too. Check out the how-to from their site,
http://rsnapshot.org/howto/1.2/rsnapshot-HOWTO.en.html

Use Rsnapshot.

It'll back up automatically, will only back up data that's changed since last time, and it rotates snapshots so you can go back to any point in time without taking up much disk space at all.

Seriously -- it's worth a serious look, even though I'm struggling to get it running right now...